Strelka Chess engine

Strelka Chess engine

Strelka is chess engine program that is created by Jury Osipov. First release was on May, 2007 and was released with closed source code. Successor of Strelka 1.0 is Strelka 2.0 and this version was released with open source code in January 2008. From the start many people were thinking and suspecting that Strelka was derivated from other chess engines, but was more ethical than legal question. Similarities in first release were observed in the technique of making decision about test-positions, and they said that Strelka was clone of Rybka 1.0. After reviewing and compiling the source code Sergei Markoff and Bryan Hoffman confirmed that Strelka is original engine and was not cloned from Rybka. However, they ask for opinion from expert Dann Corbit to declare the clearness of the Strelka code. Osipov also mentioned that he studied Rybka by using disassembler and realized that he and Rajilich went down on the same path in the technique of decision making for test-positions. In October 2011 Osipov release the latest version of Strelka, Strelka 5 as Osipov says that the code was compilation of the greatest techniques from the greatest chess engines which are on top of the world chess ranking list, and he also mentioned that he fulfil the code with some of his ideas which improves Strelka engine even more.

Main features of Strelka

Strelka is alpha-beta algorithm, but its algorithm does not search for depths to make better performance, instead Strelka use algorithm which use width to improve the tactics. Other chess engines use tables of transitions which takes a lot of memory and slows them down, but in “Strelka” this was replaced with tree technique algorithm, in which every tree determine mini-max and establish his subset tree. Also and maybe the most important innovation is evaluation function in the code. Strelka sometimes gives strange results especially if there are some odd values in position evaluating. The fact is that the results are not always based on the current position but can be based on the chain of events that happened during the game.

Ippolit Clones Selection (date: 6/5/2014)

On Ippolit Clones tournament for selection of the best Ippolit chess engines, the new release of Strelka 6 reached to the second place under the Houdini 4 Pro x64.Strelka 6 had achieved result of 97.67 Raw ELO and 3063 True ELO points in 1700 played games. Strelka 6 scored 64.29 percent, wins 41.94 percent of the games with total wined games 713. Strelka 6 loos 227 played games and in percent 13.35 percent, and remains only draws which are 44.71 percent and in played games that are 760. Houdini has left behind Strelka 6 with approximately 41 True ELO points.

Summary:

Maybe in history Strelka had own problems with other chess engines, and maybe Strelka is not the best engine on the Top World Chess ranking list, but Strelka is still great chess engine and in his own group the Ippolit group, Strelka had potential to become number one chess engine.